Hasta La Ideas

It’s Friday and we’re a bit tired after a late night of seeing Mies van der Rohe‘s Crown Hall getting lit up, so we turn ever so quickly to this story on E!‘s The Awful Truth Blog (which is written by Ted Casablaca — having both him and E! in a post seems like maybe a couple of first here at UnBeige). In a post from yesterday morning, Casablanca and co-writer Becky Bain ask, “Is the Sarah Jessica Parker Horse Painting Too Mean?” (we have to hand it to them, we’ve certainly never had a title that good). Unfortunately, they’re talking about a real painting, one by an artist named 14 who runs the decidedly funny Gallery of the Absurd. Casablanca hates the whole thing, for certain, saying “…she painted Parker literally as a horse! Is that going too far? We think so.” So Sarah Jessica Parker as a horse is too mean, gotcha. But doesn’t the question he asks in the initial title, “Is the Sarah Jessica Parker Horse Painting Too Mean?” also sort of implying that there is a certain measure of meanness that Parker deserves or Casablanca has devised? So he just wants to have us tone down our celebrity hatred, arriving at a more comfortable level of mean? What does he think of MAD Magazine, which this painting reminded us of? These are questions for you to ponder, dear readers. Personally, we just wanted to write a post where we’d get to say “Horse Painting” a lot. Mission accomplished.

You know that diamond skull that artist Damien Hirst gets really protective of and, as a result, gets beaten up over by clever artists? Almost two years to the date from its initial unveiling, which came with much shock and awe, as Hirst likes things to arrive, it’s come back into the news now as The Art Newspaper reports that the fourth stakeholder for the high-profile, very expensive piece was revealed as Viktor Pinchuk, a billionaire in the Ukraine. The find was spotted in a short paragraph in a recent Washington Post story about Hirst’s work being displayed in Kiev, the writer of the piece apparently not knowing about or caring to comment on this juicy little tidbit of art news he’d just broken in “the mystery of the unknown investors.” Here’s the quickie revelation in the piece:

And, he is such a fan of Hirst that he even bought a share of the diamond-crusted platinum skull that the artist reportedly sold two years to a group of investors for a record $100 million — though some doubt whether that much money changed hands.

That means four down and however many other secret investors there are left. Look around you. Spot any? It could be most anyone, you know (cue ominous thunder sound effect).

Speaking of interesting art pieces, as we closed that last post with, here’s something from the terrific Walker Art Center earlier this week. As part of their Year of Trisha program, celebrating the work of dancer Trisha Brown, the museum re-staged a performance of her 1970 piece, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, which “hadn’t been since in the United States since it’s New York debut nearly 40 years ago.” So they hoisted a man up to the top of the Walker itself and let him walk down, slowly and carefully. It’s certainly an impressive feat and definitely not a clip for those timid about heights.

Still from Giardini 2009 © Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen represents Great Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale with a new film, Giardini. You can see a few excerpts from the work here, in an interview on the British Council site, or click through for some stills, which look rather beautiful in their own right…

Still from Giardini 2009 © Steve McQueen

The idea for situating the film in the Venice Giardini, the gardens that contain the thirty permanent pavilions used during the Biennale, came to McQueen when he was in the city for the 2007 festival.

The British Pavilion is a “beautiful building… monumental”, he says in the interview on the British Council site, but also has a “human element… a human character”.

Still from Giardini 2009 © Steve McQueen

Of the new film McQueen says: “There is an everydayness about it, it’s not exotic or foreign, but specific to the Giardini and to Venice.”

Still from Giardini 2009 © Steve McQueen

Still from Giardini 2009 © Steve McQueen

The Guardian’s Charlotte Hingins spoke to McQueen about the film in an interesting piece, here.

Steve McQueen: Giardini, Venice Biennale 2009.
Photography by Prudence Cuming
© The British Council
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris; Thomas Dane Gallery, London

More on the British Pavilion at britishcouncil.org/venicebiennale.

Opening tomorrow at the Smithfield Gallery in London is a new exhibition by United Visual Artists. The collective is perhaps best known for its large-scale light-based installations made for clients including Tate Modern, Giorgio Armani and Massive Attack, yet for their first solo show, UVA have created a series (titled Deus) of still images, displayed on lightboxes.

“Most of our light works are experiential, set in the real world for people to touch, feel and interact with; they’re here today, gone tomorrow,” say Matt Clark and James Medcraft of UVA, who created Deus. “The challenge we set ourselves with this exhibition was to distill these explorations with light into single images, while retaining the emotive quality of our installation work.”

“The exhibition will contain a series of large-scale photographic prints which explore the effect of artificial light on the natural landscape,” the pair continue. “We travelled to the darkest depths of Britain, looking for places that had been influenced by man’s intervention but never artificially illuminated. Introducing the artificial light had a transforming effect, literally creating a new place that only existed momentarily.” The exhibition will continue until June 26. More info is at thesmithfieldgallery.com.